Lewis Katz’s Vision for the New Jersey Nets Went Unrealized

Lewis Katz with the N.B.A. Eastern Conference championship trophy the Nets won by beating the Celtics in 2002.CreditBarton Silverman/The New York Times

In November 1999, Lewis Katz stood on a high school stage in New Jersey’s largest city and told an audience of students, local politicians and a smiling President Bill Clinton, “The New Jersey Nets are coming to Newark — remember that.”

The declaration, made at Malcolm X Shabazz High School, was warmly received, especially by Clinton, who was praising investment in urban areas on what was billed as his New Markets tour.

“To have the Nets in Newark and the commitment they’ve made to have 40 percent of the profits go to the community and the children is a challenge to all sports teams to follow the path of Lewis Katz and Ray Chambers,” Clinton said that day.

This was the grand share-the-wealth vision of Katz, who grew up poor in impoverished Camden, N.J., and Raymond Chambers, a financier and philanthropist who wanted to lift his native Newark. Along with 15 other minor investors, they bought the long-losing Nets in 1998 — from an ownership group known as the Secaucus Seven — for $150 million and promised to make it the people’s franchise.

The plan detoured and eventually dissolved, but it was under Katz’s highly visible ownership that the Nets enjoyed their greatest success as an N.B.A. franchise, reaching the league finals in 2002 and 2003 after the acquisition of point guard Jason Kidd.

It was Katz — who died at 72 with six other passengers in a plane crash near Boston on Saturday night just days after taking ownership of Philadelphia’s daily newspapers — who hired Rod Thorn to run the Nets’ basketball operations in 1999. It was Thorn who made the franchise-defining trade with Phoenix: Stephon Marbury for Kidd.

“Lew knew basketball extremely well,” said Bruce C. Ratner, who purchased the Nets from the Katz-Chambers group in 2004 and became friendly with Katz while fund-raising for Clinton’s first presidential campaign. “He’d sit and watch games, several at once, switching back and forth.”

With Chambers known for privacy, it was the outgoing Katz who assumed and relished the role as “the frontman,” according to Gary Sussman, the Brooklyn Nets’ vice president of public relations, who joined the team during the Katz-Chambers years.

“He was always around, very approachable guy, no airs about him,” Sussman said.

Katz liked to attend practice and was especially proud of his ability to make free throws. He moved to rid the Nets of their lightweight status in comparison to the Knicks. In 1999, Katz signed off on a guaranteed six-year contract for a team-record $85.8 million for the Nets’ most charismatic player, center Jayson Williams.

That year, Katz fired John Calipari, flying the beleaguered coach to Toronto on his private jet to inform the players, who had already been told of the dismissal by Tony Robbins, the self-help expert who had been counseling the team.

After years of practicing in places unfit for an N.B.A. team — even sharing a locker room with truck drivers for a time — the Nets built a state-of-the-art center in East Rutherford. But it was ambition that helped undo the Newark relocation dream and all the promised trimmings. In 1999, the Nets entered a partnership with the Yankees, creating YankeeNets, with the intent to create a regional powerhouse and provide year-round programming for the cable network YES, which made its debut that year.

All of a sudden, George Steinbrenner, who had mulled a sale of the Yankees to Cablevision’s Charles F. Dolan, sounded like the Jersey guys, talking urban redevelopment in the South Bronx around Yankee Stadium.

“They came together and had this vision,” said Lou Lamoriello, the president and general manager of the Devils, the N.H.L. franchise that became a major player in YankeeNets when it joined the group. “It was a good idea. and we can all see what the YES network became. But you had some strong personalities involved. It wasn’t going in the same direction.” (Katz was an owner of the Devils from 2000 to 2004.)

According to Ratner, friction developed between Katz and Steinbrenner, whose capricious behavior was troubling for Katz.

“The Nets were losing money, Steinbrenner wasn’t happy, and he and Lew didn’t get along,” Ratner said. “And while the whole thing with Newark was sincere, I think Lew and Ray Chambers started to realize that the financial aspect of it just wasn’t possible.”

Still, the Yankees, the Devils and the Nets were having competitive success, with the Nets’ being the most surprising. Early in Kidd’s first season, they went into Madison Square Garden and toyed with the Knicks. As the crowd dispersed from the lower bowl, Katz stood triumphantly in the second row, wearing a black leather jacket that had “Nets” stitched into the back.

“Terrible, just terrible, for us to come in here and win like this,” Katz said, with a mischievous grin.

Ratner called Katz “a real prankster,” who tried standup comedy in college. Most of all, Ratner said, Katz was a proud survivor, a charitable man whose father died when he was a baby and who was shaped by his humble beginning.

In that context, he became frustrated by his flirtation with professional sports.

“When he sold me the team, he was actually fed up with what was going on,” Ratner said. “It wasn’t what he thought it would be, and he was relieved to get out.”

Katz retained a very small stake in the team after the sale and move to Brooklyn. He and Ratner remained friends and had breakfast two weeks ago.

“We talked about getting older,” Ratner said. “About how we don’t get to spend enough time with friends, with family. And then this happens.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Vision for Nets and Newark Went Unrealized. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe